NIH eRA Items of Interest — July 2016

Who’s Who? AMS Answers That Question

So here is a challenge for research administrators… How do you get a list of all the people affiliated with your institution that:
Have an eRA Commons account
Have a role of PI, and/or
Have a role of IAR?
It’s enough to make your eye twitch (see pic) and your brain hurt. Or at least it was.

Now as part of eRA Commons, on the Account Management tab you can search for just this kind of information. But wait, there’s more!

Not only can you search for this information, you can export it as well! When you go to the Admin tab>Accounts>Account Management, eRA Commons will open a new window. Here, under AMS (Account Management System), you will see two options: Manage Accounts and AMS User Reports. It is the AMS User Reports that will make your life infinitely easier.
AMS User Reports allows you to search for users affiliated with your institution based on eRA Commons roles. That would be all 19 eRA Commons roles, scientific and administrative. The search is inclusive, meaning that if you search for, say an Account Administrator (AA) and an Assistant (ASST), the results will include users with either one of those roles or both of those roles.
Once the results are returned, the system defaults to showing 10 results per page, but this can be changed to 25, 50 or All. And unlike account searching that is limited to returning a maximum of 500 results, there is no limit to this search. It is already restricted to only search your institution, not all of eRA Commons.
Now how do you get those results in some kind of shareable format? Easy. You will also see two buttons: Export to Excel, and Export to PDF. Awesomely self-explanatory here… clicking either of these buttons will download the results in the format selected. BOOM! Done! (mic drop).

FCOI Confusion?

Christmas morning growing up was always a huge event, like for so many kids. In our house, my two older brothers and I would wake up well before dawn and anxiously await for our parents to roll out of bed. Then when we got the OK, we would race down the stairs. Santa always left our presents in individual piles, one for each of us. When I was 5 years old, I remember being so confused because the piles for myself and my oldest brother were small and consisted of socks, underwear, a toothbrush, etc. While Sean’s pile was almost as high as the tree and was made up of an Erector Set, Hot Wheels, GI Joes, etc. and no socks, and no underwear.
And sometimes we do this to you too. We surprise in the most unexpected ways. Which sometimes leaves you confused. Case in point, we recently added a new field to the Institutional Profile form for Financial Conflict of Interest (FCOI) email address. This is found in the Institution Contact Information section. In most institutions, the people responsible for addressing financial conflicts are less directly involved in the grant process and so, over the years we had received numerous requests to have a place to put an email address for those folks. So, we did.
Now it is a required field, and we needed to put something in there for all the preexisting institutions at the time of the update. After some debate and discussion, it was decided that the field would be prefilled with the same email address as the Notice of Award (NoA) email field.
Here comes the surprising and confusing part. Some of you are now asking why your NoA folks are getting FCOI emails. And now you have the answer. The fix however, is easy. Update your Institutional Profile form with the desired email address for Financial Conflict of Interest related communications, and then sigh a deep breath of relief.
Just as I did when my parents, momentarily astounded, said that Santa must have made a mistake as they quickly rearranged the piles for a more equitable distribution of toys. Of course, Santa’s mistake was not realizing my brother Sean would sneak downstairs in the middle of the night and rearrange the piles!

Blowing into the Windy City: NIH Regional 2016

What? So I like cartoons (and dinosaurs). Don’t judge me.
NIH is hitting the road again! This time in the Windy City, Chicago, IL , October 26-28, 2016. After a wonderful regional seminar in Baltimore in May, we are ready to do it again. This time I am looking forward to deep dish pizza, maybe a Cubbies game, or seeing The Bean! Registration for Chicago is as easy, so sign up soon! The agenda is full of great learning and sharing opportunities, and, of course I will be there with a bunch of wonderful NIH staff who will also be conducting the ever popular 1:1 sessions. Like the loveable troupe of intelligent dinosaurs that come from the past to educate folks of modern day, we come to help you learn about NIH’s grant processes. And we promise to fill up on our Brain Grain

Have a wonder July 4th Holiday!